Hung
This morning was more excruciating than others.
Talisman inches from his mouth, Victor felt his agonies layered anew.
His back was on fire, bruised and mottled when he looked at it in the mirror. The hollows beneath his eyes matched in purple and green. Standing made him feel as dizzy as he had that very first night. Before he knew what was happening, before he knew what he’d done.
He wanted to curl into a ball and not move. Just sink into this mattress and cease to be.
Victor left the talisman on the table and closed his eyes.
Elias, wherever he was, had settled. His fear and anger had abated into something more like sorrow or depression. There were still spikes of anxiety, but fresh pain didn’t wrack him like it had once before.
Victor closed his eyes and tried to push feelings of remorse through the bond, but he had no way of knowing if Elias received them.
He then tried to push soothing through the bond and received back a push of extreme anxiety and then pain again. Bad enough that Victor gasped and curled even tighter.
Elias was so sad right now that tears sprang to Victor’s own eyes. He let the waves of Elias’s sorrow wash over him.
Victor was rarely sad, but when he was, he felt it in his face close to his eyes and in his stomach when he knew he was at fault.
Elias felt sadness like a tsunami that flowed from the top of his head through to his fingertips and down to his toes. Rushing forth and receding: the ocean meeting the shore. He felt it deeply, too deep to concentrate in a singular place.
Victor sobbed. He clenched his teeth around a wad of sheets and let Elias overwhelm him.
He rocked in place, as all the shades of Elias’s sorrow ran through.
Elias knew he was listening now, and this is what Victor handed him: deep brushstrokes of the sadness hidden in terror, a lush wave of self-loathing, loneliness so potent it made Victor wretch and heave until his mouth filled with bile.
Anger, raw and terrible. The kind of fury that made one blind and forgetful in their violence.
Elias pushed toward Victor woe so deep it felt like he was drowning. Dark enough that Victor wished that he were dead.
Then the agony of understanding. A peculiar thing to feel, but Victor recognized it anyway. He’d felt it when he realized he would never quite be welcome among his peers. When he’d sat in the stuffed armchair at Mr. Sauer’s home and copied addresses. Knowing that he would not be welcomed back.
Elias followed that with resignation, tight and heavy, centered in his chest, the tragedy of helplessness and the horror of that struggle.
Then, after a brief pause, like Elias was thinking, he sent him regular sadness again. But this time it felt like rain, like disappointment, refreshing in its regularity.
Victor grabbed tight to this feeling and held it inside himself, arms wrapped around his chest. He felt his own sadness reaching up to meet it. Twined around it until they were enmeshed together.
“I’m sorry,” Victor said out loud. Trying the words out for size. Tasting them.
Elias’s sorrow retreated and something else was filtering through: satisfaction. But not the satisfaction of a job well done, the sticky dark satisfaction of revenge well had.
A hysteric thrill welled inside him, and Victor got the sense that he was being laughed at. The combination of the two was so immediately terrifying that Victor sat up and scrambled for the talisman. He shoved it in his mouth, tucking it under his tongue, where it seemed to work best.
The feeling abated, but his heart still raced.
Elias felt deeply. The way he felt his emotions was stunning. So much so that Victor had begun to think of him fondly in spite of their pain. He didn’t know if you could have another that close to your heart and not ache.
But this was a crisp reminder that that was a mistake. Victor didn’t know him. They were enemies. And that was Victor’s fault.
Victor let out a long breath and wrenched a hand through his hair. He wiped the tears from his cheeks and the spit from his chin and got out of bed.